A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
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I hate Discord.
The interface is clunky.
They always try to sell you useless (at least for me) options.
What with the users posting so many gifs?
Discord, Reddit and Lemmy are bad choices for forums. If you want ANY useful information to stick, put it on forums you know are gonna get indexed and archived reliably. Reddit is indexable but there's no guarantee the page will still be there when you search for it through Google.
Discord is completely unindexable so any information that exists on a server that gets deleted is lost forever.
Lemmy is a half-way house. As far as I know it's kinda indexable but not really.
Discord is bad because its forums are not world-readable, therefore not indexable. It's very useful to the rest of the world to have conversations be public. The youngest users here may not even remember but searching Google in the 2000s before Facebook went huge and when forums were all world-readable, it was a different experience altogether. You could find somebody who was talking about your niche issue/product - no matter what it was. It was kind of magical. No matter what thing happened to you, you could be pretty sure it had happened to someone else and they were talking about it somewhere and Google would see it and point it out to you.
Not anymore. Everything's on Facebook now and Google can't see it, nor can anyone else - except Facebook. All that legacy knowledge just tucked away in Facebook's data vault and essentially useless to anybody but Facebook, which makes it less than useless.
Recently I've created a private forum and so far I'm very happy with it. It's nice that our discussions are private, keeping data gobblers, programmatic advertisers, grifters and other schmucks like this out in the cold.
To be clear, I'm advertising the idea, not membership.
Honestly reddit's (and Lemmy's) comment formatting structure is so much better than other forums that it's been part of the reason why I don't want to use the other ones.
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Firefox can translate websites locally now.
Make Lemmy great again!
Funny thing...an internet forum group from 23 years ago is slowly reforming because everyone is sick of the same thing re:socmed
What can we do? What can we do about Meta and Xitter and Reddit? Just try to show people that there's another side where the grass actually is greener and invite them to join.
Forums are still alive in ultra niche communities. My favorites: Badger and Blade for wet shaving, Snuffhouse for snuff tobacco, Quantnet for quantitative finance. All of these gather way better content and users than their Reddit counterpart, which usually devolves into memes and pic of the day stuff
Everytime I want to look for modern solutions to newer projects online it's always in the damn discord. I have like 20 discords in folders just because I feel like I'll need them to troubleshoot eventually.
Something I was hopeful for but seems to have died is lemmyBB. A phpBB-style front-end to Lemmy. I'd like the accessibility of being able to use an existing account that federation brings but the forum-style approach that phpBB has.
Mostly though I've been disappointed in the teens and twenty-somethings. They seem to have, in distressingly large numbers, just opted to go along with whatever they're encouraged to use by large platform holders. There doesn't seem to be an appetite to create communities and define spaces that they control. Perhaps that's just me getting old though...
FWIW it's very common now to see at least open source projects run their own Matrix channels instead of Discord/IRC/xxx.
(I see in other comments that there's some confusion regarding Element and Matrix. Element is a client, Matrix is the protocol. Yes, Element-the-company does their best to add to this confusion)
most of them, but alot of them for niche subjects are still there. theres one i go to where people were banned from reddit (tons of accounts used for linking, OF and advert) basiclaly they are reporting thier experiences the same way here as right there. medical forums is still alive though, as are "joining the military"ones.
plenty of pointed discourse forums out there. I agree that the search engines may be the problem. You have to know where to look.